Facets are one of the least understood and most esoteric parts of the C++ standard library. Because they are rarely used, there are few code examples, which in turn means most people never encounter them.

This is a great shame! Facets are a fascinating and multifa rich source of coding fun!

The news that the BBC has started "encrypting" its RTMP streams came, in one of those coincidences, just as I'd decided to work on adding RTMP support to Gnash. So even when Gnash's RTMP video streaming works, it will still be legally difficult, if not impossible, for licence fee payers who care about software freedom to use the BBC's iPlayer.

I wanted, on an impulse, to find out about the prominence of Free Software in the UK. Political support for Free Software occasionally makes the headlines, but how much of a presence does it have in everyday IT?

How would anyone try to find out about Free Software? By turning to the internet, of course! So I want to know what they would encounter. I used a well-known search engine to look for Free Software activity in the UK, and this is what I found:

This week I implemented the LocalConnection ActionScript class in Gnash. It is too late for Gnash 0.8.7, which should be released imminently. But the six months of testing before the next release are certainly a good thing where this code is concerned.

LocalConnection allows the player to communicate with other players or instances using shared memory. It is even used for communication between AS2 and AS3 loaded in the same SWF, since they can't otherwise talk to each other.